Random inspiration

As is the case during traditional and religious celebrations that still take place in Venice today, the streets, bridges, alleyways and steps are crowded with onlookers and many more are shown looking out of the windows.

The Virgin, John the Evangelist, and Mary Magdalene here mourn over the body of Christ on the hilltop of Golgotha. The city of Jerusalem is depicted in the left background, although the landscape shows the fertile green hills and valleys of the Low Countries.

This subject was extremely popular among artists in Bruges, and several versions of it exist by Gerard David and others.

Christ is immediately recognizable by the dazzling halo. He has just aroused many emotions by introducing the sacrament of Holy Communion and by announcing his betrayal by one of the Apostles.

This painting, commissioned by the Cardinal Ludovico Lodovisi, was inspired by Raphael’s St Cecilia.

In the early 1530s Domenico Campagnola started to make drawings - mostly of panoramic landscapes - to be sold as autonomous works of art, mounted and framed under glass. This revolutionary step endowed drawing with a new character. This rupture of the umbilical cord that tied drawing to painting was a substantially Venetian achievement.

Apollo was sent by his father Jupiter to serve king Admetus as a shepherd, a punishment for killing the Cyclopes, Jupiter’s armourers. This pastoral Apollo sits under a tree and is playing his lyre while sheep browse in a meadow. He is also a herdsman watching over cattle somewhat inattentively, since Mercury succeeds in stealing them unobserved.

Hobbema’s fame rests on a group of landscapes painted between 1662 and 1668, most of which are composed along similar lines to the present example, with a hamlet of thatched timber-framed farmhouses nestling under oak trees growing in thin, sandy soil.

The couple was originally in an interior, which Nicolaes Berchem later overpainted with a landscape.

Gossart takes a virtuosic delight in Italianate and late-Gothic detail. Mother and Son are seen against a still-Eyckian trompe l’oeil, reddish-brown stone slab, a fictive frame within a frame. The tightly cropped composition and the assertive sculptural approach to the figures, which are visually projected into the viewer’s space, are features of Gossart’s late style. The allusion to sculpture is further enhanced by the pale tones and the smooth, seemingly highly polished surface of the flesh areas.

Francesco Bertos created a considerable number of complicated pyramidal groups in a very distinctive, ingenious style that mirrors the lightness and airiness of contemporary Rococo painting in France. Four groups in the Walters Art Museum are allegories of the four continents, of which the world was then thought to consist. All have their names engraved.

In the allegory of Africa, the continent is depicted by people who, in a simple, peaceful way of life, gather grain from the fertile ground. A lion and a snake indicate the African continent.

This Renaissance church outside Urbino was designed by Francesco di Giorgio Martini. The Dukes Federico and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro are buried here.

The painting was executed in Antwerp and it clearly shows the influence of Flemish painters.

Work on the royal monastery of Batalha was proceeding at the beginning of the 16th century. Mateus Fernandes (d. 1515) had run an efficient workshop since the turn of the 16th century, and it was he who was entrusted with the continuation of work on the Capelas Imperfeitas, the pantheon of Duarte I, left unfinished by Huguet. By 1509 the main doorway was complete. It is probably the richest and finest masonry work of the time. The Late Gothic splayed doorway is capped by several layers of intersecting arches while all the architectural features are covered with Flamboyant decoration.

In 1516 work on the chapel was largely abandoned and the chapel remained unfinished.

The picture shows the main portal of the Capelas Imperfeitas in the monastery of Batalha.

The work of Francisco Salzillo exemplifies the impact of the Rococo idiom on Spanish sculpture of the period. He perfected his style in processional groups like the Last Super. In this ambitious composition, the twelve apostles seated around the table are distinguished by a precisely rendered psychological characterization.

Night scenes like this were particularly popular amongst Dutch artists, and Schalken specialised in this subject. Although the exact meaning of the boy with a firebrand is not known today, it derived from a painting by the Italian artist Jacopo Bassano and was also enthusiastically adopted by El Greco, who incorporated the motif in his Allegory which is also in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland. It is likely that Schalcken executed this painting for Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland, while visiting Althorp during the period he spent in Britain.

In 1664 Le Duc was entrusted with some of the church fittings - including the baldacchino - in the Val-de-Grâce. This baldacchino was for a long time attributed to Gianlorenzo Bernini, but the legal documents name Le Muet and Le Duc without specifying which of the two was the maker of the work.

The high altar with the sculpture group of the Nativity is the work of Michel Anguier.